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Busybody Accuses a Man and Then Falls for Him

An actress with Bette Davis eyes may never win the Miss Universe title. But if those eyes belong to significant talent, their magnetic field can attract Oscar nominations and film festival awards beyond the grasp of any shrink-wrapped beauty contestant. The wonderful Brazilian actress Fernanda Montenegro, familiar to us from "Central Station," has only to widen her soulful brown eyes to suggest a sorrowful kindhearted South American answer to Giulietta Masina.

Ms. Montenegro's rough-hewn integrity is the one quality that ennobles "The Other Side of the Street," an otherwise confused mixture of cat-and-mouse thriller and sentimental old folks' love story that is well below the level of "Central Station." The movie's scenario suggests "Rear Window" as it might have been rejiggered for another bright-eyed Davis spinoff, Angela Lansbury playing everyone's favorite snoop, Jessica Fletcher.

Regina, Ms. Montenegro's character, is a Jessica-like busybody with a scolding air. Divorced, with a son she rarely sees, she devotes much of her endless spare time to "senior service," as a volunteer watchdog on the lookout for crime in the Copacabana neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro.

All fired up by the breakup of a child-prostitution ring based on one of her tips, Regina spends hours each night scouring the windows of the building across the way through binoculars. When she witnesses a man's possible murder of his wife by lethal injection, she is certain she has struck criminal gold and notifies the police. But the suspect, Camargo (Raul Cortez), a judge, is not arrested. Outraged, Regina decides to play sleuth.

The movie noisily shifts gears once Camargo notices Regina and asks her out. Without confessing that she was the spy who summoned the law to his apartment, she eventually hears his version of events surrounding the death of his wife, who had cancer. A romance develops, and the intense love scenes between Ms. Montenegro and Mr. Cortez, both over 70, are the movie's strongest moments; it is virtually unheard of to find two actors of such advanced age generating such screen heat.

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"The Other Side of the Street" is the directorial debut of Marcos Bernstein, a co-writer of "Central Station." He fails to pull this movie's strands into a suspenseful thriller or an autumnal love story whose sunset colors linger in the mind.

'The Other Side of the Street' Opens today in Manhattan.

Directed by Marcos Bernstein; written (in Portuguese, with English subtitles) by Mr. Bernstein and Melanie Dimantas; director of photography, Toca Seabra; edited by Marcelo Moraes; music by Guilherme Bernstein Seixas; art director, Bia Junqueira; produced by Kátia Machado and Mr. Bernstein; released by Strand Releasing. At the Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 98 minutes. This film is not rated.